Weekend Update

Note: the 9/24 entry has been updated. A picture of the students from the speech contest was added.

Friday night, I went to Brown Sugar with Yuko, had a few drinks, then came back to my place and watched WaterBoys the movie. It was about an all-boys high school synchronized swimming team. The movie was based on a real story and was super popular in Japan. Though it turned into a cultural phenomenon of sorts and spawned two TV series, it wasn`t exactly what I would call a date movie. Spent the whole movie trying to decipher the Japanese dialogog and Yuko`s body language, neither of which became clear to me.

Satuday I joined a bus trip to Nichinan organized by the Yonago international exchange center. Nichinan is about an hour south of Yonago, a city with the lowest population in Tottori (~6000) but the largest area (about a tenth of the prefecture). Over 50% of the population of Nichinan is 65 or older. We met the locals, made mochi(rice cake with fillings, made by pounding steamed rice into a glutinous blob) and soba (Japanese buckwheat noodles), watched Japanese traditional folk music performance, taiko performance, and sat in a Japanese tea ceremony. I also met Yuko`s friend Elsa, the Singaporean girl working at Penasonic who`s leaving Japan in November. Elsa and Yuko have the same haircut, which both excited and terrified me with thoughts of Single White Female and high heels. Some pics:


Mochi pounding.


The owner of the local soba shop demonstrating how to cut soba noodles from the soba dough that we kneaded and rolled out.


The results of 20 years of kneading soba dough. He also does rock climbing.


Guns!


Shamisen, 3-stringed traditional Japanese instrument.


Japanese folk-singing.

Matt learned that pale-skinned demons with shaved heads are big hits with Japanese kids.

No pictures of taiko drumming were taken, 1) I was pretty tired by that point and 2) wasn`t impressed after watching the Stanford taiko for years. They did let us play with the taiko drums after their performance though, which was more than what the Stanford taiko had ever done for me.

Got back to Yonago around 4:30pm. We received more mochi and apple jam from the city of Nichinan. Not bad for a free trip! Biked home in the rain, Made champloos (traditional Okinawan dish with goya, eggs and tofu, also one of the topics of the speech contest) and hung out with Ian at my apartment. He borrowed the car to onsen with Simona and friend, I stayed home until Yuko came by around 8:30. She got wet in the rain and borrowed my sweatpants. Why is it that girls always look better in your clothing? We drank coffee, ate mochi and listened to her jazz CDs. Ian came back and I drove her to YSP bowling alley to meet Elsa. I declined to join Yuko, Elsa and company in bowling. There was much more to be said and done betw/ Yuko and me but tonight just wasn`t the time for it. In my state of unfulfilled wanting, I stopped by Simona`s with Ian, she couldn`t hang out, so I drank chu-hai with Ian back in my apartment until 3am.

Sunday: ran 6km at ~8min/mile pace for ekidan training (I`m running with the other teachers in an ekiden race on the 24th), bought a jacket and a reading chair from the second-hand store, watched Deconstructing Harry in the chair and fell asleep in it. It was a good reclining rattan chair, perfect for dwelling in one`s imaginary world while avoiding reality.